101 Corridor Deal.

Holualoa Cos., which has been buying up Southern California property since 1997, has added the Heritage Financial Center in Agoura Hills to its portfolio.

Holualoa purchased the office building at 30851 W. Agoura Road for $7.75 million from GE Capital, which occupies about half the building. It is about 80 percent leased, counting GE Capital, said Aroon Chinai, vice president at Holualoa.

Chinai said the plan is to add parking between the three-story building and the freeway and "try to lease it up." The glass-and-brick building was constructed in 1983 for Heritage Life, which was subsequently acquired by GE.

Holualoa is a private investment company that was started -- guess where? -- in Hawaii in the late 1980s by I. Michael Kasser. The company then began investing in Arizona, followed by California in 1996.

Chinai said that when he first arrived in L.A., he started looking at deals on the Westside and making offers, but no one would take the company with the unusual name seriously, especially with Arden Realty and Douglas Emmett hotly vying for deals.

"I said, 'I guess I have to go where no one wants to go -- downtown,"' Chinai said. The company's first purchase was the Coast Savings Building at Ninth and Hill streets, for $4.55 million from a partnership run by Sam Zell that had invested about $15 million in the property. Since then, Holualoa has taken the building from 69 percent occupied to 91 percent, with a pending lease with the state of California.

Holualoa now owns 12 buildings in L.A. and Orange counties, including several in the San Fernando Valley and along the 101 Corridor, and it has two deals in progress in San Diego. It generally goes after B-quality buildings in A and B locations.

"We're looking for properties in markets with strong job growth in communities that are desirable to live in," Chinai said.

Mark Leonard of Cushman & Wakefield represented both sides in the Agoura Hills deal, and Timothy Arick of Dwyer-Curlett & Co. arranged the financing.